Trump, “Shitholes,” and the Nature of “Us”

Donald Trump’s comment about “shithole countries” capped a week that included the arrest of the immigration-rights activist Ravi Ragbir during his annual check-in with ICE.

Photograph by Mark Lennihan / AP

On Thursday, Trump called Haiti and African states “shithole countries,” and that was, in a way, the least of it this week. The same day,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City arrested the
immigration-rights activist Ravi Ragbir during his scheduled annual
check-in with the agency. On Wednesday, ICE raided 7-Eleven stores in
seventeen states and the District of Columbia, arresting twenty-one
people. And on Tuesday the Justice Department announced that it had secured an order revoking the U.S. citizenship of Baljinder Singh, who had been living in the United States since 1991. That was
this week in America’s war on immigrants.

Tempting as it may be to see this war as the creation of the Trump
Administration—the outcome of electing the man who promised to build the
Wall—this is not the case. The raids on the 7-Eleven stores apparently
stem from an ICE investigation of the convenience-store chain that goes
back to 2013. The denaturalization proceedings against Singh grew out of
a 2016 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of
Inspector General about an investigation into the fingerprint records of
naturalized citizens; it found more than a hundred thousand records that
had not been transferred from an older database to a current one, and
identified more than eight hundred people who may have been naturalized
in spite of being ineligible. In other words, the Trump Administration
didn’t start the hunt for “bad” immigrants but merely intensified it. It
has revoked Obama-era guidelines for setting priorities in the
deportation process, rendering it indiscriminate. The number of ICE arrests has grown by forty per cent in the past year (though the number of deportations remains comparable to the Obama years).

The apparent schizophrenia of Obama’s policies, with a swelling wave of
deportations on one hand and his attempt to secure an American future
for Dreamers on the other, reflects a tension inherent in immigration
policy. America claims the identity of a nation of immigrants, yet it
strives to keep out the immigrants it deems undesirable. In the past,
the United States has banned entry to homosexuals, members of certain
political movements, and people seen as nonwhite. In fact, the
relatively short list of naturalized Americans who have been stripped of
their citizenship includes the case of
Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian man who served in the U.S. Army during the
First World War and who, the Supreme Court concluded, in 1923, had lied
when he claimed to be a “free white person” as defined by the Naturalization Act of 1906.

Most of the people who have been stripped of their U.S. citizenship are
guilty of heinous crimes: they are Nazi concentration-camp guards,
Bosnian Serb killer-brigade members, participants in the Rwandan
genocide. A handful appear to have been denaturalized for less-serious
reasons, such as having committed immigration fraud by marrying solely
for the purpose of getting a green card. But the Baljinder Singh case might be the first in a new category of bureaucratic enforcement.

Singh, who was born in India, came to the United States in 1991, without
any identity documents. He was placed in detention, and deportation
proceedings against him began. Then, after he was released into the
custody of a friend, he failed to appear for a deportation hearing and
was ordered deported in absentia; he filed for asylum. None of this is
unusual for an asylum seeker, nor is what happened afterward: Singh
still hadn’t had an asylum interview in 1996, when he married a woman
who was a U.S. citizen. After that, he abandoned his asylum application
and filed for a green card and, eventually, for citizenship. On his
citizenship application, he failed to indicate that he had once been
ordered deported, and that he had originally been admitted into the
United States under the name Davinder Singh, rather than Baljinder
Singh. These omissions have now cost him his citizenship. The case
against Singh contains no allegations of other violations. It appears
that Singh has lived in the United States his entire adult life, without
incident. The Justice Department has stated that he is forty-three,
which would mean that he came to this country as a teen-ager.

Denaturalization is a terrifying concept. It’s a way of literally and
legally other-ing a person. The very possibility of denaturalization
makes it impossible for immigrants ever to feel fully secure. All
non-citizens in the United States live in a state of precariousness:
one’s visa or legal-resident status can be revoked on the basis of even
a minor violation (jumping a subway turnstile can be interpreted as an
act of “moral turpitude”), or because the President has said so. Since
the election of Donald Trump, non-citizen immigrants have lived with
ever greater uncertainty; many have been advised to avoid leaving the
country, in case they are not allowed to reënter, for any reason or no
reason. But the uncertainty is supposed to dissipate once one is
naturalized. Naturalization is like adoption: once it has taken effect,
the adopted child is legally indistinguishable from a biological one.
But, if one can be denaturalized, one can never really become a child of
America.

The philosopher Moshe Halbertal has written that a moral life demands
overcoming the natural human tendency to “self-privilege.” People feel
most comfortable and secure in a closed circle of “us,” but we also
realize that broadening that circle to include others makes us better
people. For most of its history, U.S. immigration policy has represented
an attempt to negotiate the duelling demands of moral ambition and a
sense of security.

Trump, and Trumpism, rejects the very idea of this negotiation. The
White House doesn't recognize the tension that plagued previous
Administrations; this Administration has no moral ambition. It’s all “us.” The White House statement following the President’s reported “shithole” remark confirmed this attitude yet again: “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump
will always fight for the American people,” the deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, said.

In the absence of moral ambition, fear comes to the fore: the fear of
the other, and the fear that “we” want to instill in the other. Singh’s
denaturalization, and other pending denaturalization cases that stem
from the same Inspector General report, are meant to scare potential
immigrants into compliance—or, better yet, into not coming to this
country in the first place. Commenting on the 7-Eleven raids, top ICE officials also stressed that they were intended to send a message to
potential violators, and that there would be more such raids in the future.

In scaring others, Trump Country also scares itself. Trumpism traffics
in fear and demands mobilization. Mobilization demands an enemy. With
every passing day, and every tweet, the image of the immigrant as the
enemy looms larger, while the circle of “us” continues to get smaller.